Bitcoin Forum

Most intersting snippet is that there should be a demo of the ATM next week in Los Angeles.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2302645969001/bitcoin-crash-coming/?playlist_id=937116503001

Classic attack journalism. Aggressively ask questions in rapid fire succession in order to unsettle the interviewee, cut his answers short with new questions.

Basically, subliminal message that they are trying to put out is to confirm the "Bitcoin is a scam!" first impression many people have who haven't looked into too deeply ... i.e. scaring away the sheeple.

Not too too bad, for eventually Berwick managed to give the correct answer to the "nobody knows who runs this" argument:

I think maybe the Winkelvoss twins involvement has got Bitcoin talk/inquiries going round the chatterati in DC, NY and the Fed. propaganda machine has been awoken.

If the those airheads at the center of power start to question "what is money?" ... then the game has begun, CONfidence can be fickle thing, especially when trust has been abused.

When asked "who runs bitcoin?", I wish Berwick had thought of answering "who runs the Internet?" instead of mentioning the Federal Reserve.

Though I guess the journalist thinks internet is run by Google or Facebook...   ::)

the best answer to this question is simple:  "The People run it".

Sounds too rhetorical, imho.

PS.  Actually I'd be embarrassed if I had to answer the question "who runs internet?".  If we set aside DNS, internet is basically an implementation of TCP/IP, which is a network protocol.  So basically internet is run by anyone who is capable of administrating a TCP/IP network.   So I guess internet is run by network administrators all around the world.

I'ld like to know more about where this ATM (s) will be in Southern California.

i'd like to know what licensing is required.

My best guess would be that, in this case, "demoing in LA" should under no condition be read as "deploying in LA".

Fox Business News and the guy didn't know that a Federal Reserve Note is a dollar bill. OMG!

He, yeah that was kind of the tell that he was an idiot.

It is actually a good point of distinction because the Federal Reserve Notes are not strictly US Dollar Bills. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 just made FRN redeemable into US Dollar Bills and the colloquial use to correlate the two exactly has been ingrained down through the generations since then. In the eyes of the law though, they must be distinct monetary instruments, or the FRN would be unconstitutional as per Article I, Sect. 8 & 10.

Bitcoin is like a corporation run directly by shareholders, each shareholder is a node, whose voting power of the network is determined by its hashrate. Since these shareholders are in constant communication with each other, they can make decisions all the time through consensus, and would never feel the need to elect a director.

If the nodes controlling more than 50% of the hashing power decide to force a resolution, they can gain limited power of the rest of the nodes, such as reverse their own spending, they can not, however, reverse other people's spending, or steal other people's bitcoins.

If you are going to be interviewed, please memorize this:

Well, to be fair, Jeff Berwick doesn't even know Satoshi Nakamoto's name ("sakamoto", lol).

This is one of the things that is awesome about Bitcoin and is very difficult to explain.  Its like the ultimate democracy, in a fork situation each individual would vote by choosing which client (or both) to run.  These 2 bitcoin currencies then compete against each other until the market decides which is best.  It would be like the government simultaneously passing 2 conflicting laws, allowing people to choose which they prefer and then sometime in the future comparing the success of each choice.

But I think a mass media (simple) explanation is:

Its like gravity.  Nobody "runs" or "controls" it; its laws are encoded in open source software.  It is irrelevant who created it.  The software is visible to everyone and has been studied by many experts.  The fact that Isaac Newton first discovered the laws of gravity had no effect on gravity itself.

Yes. That or "who runs gold?"

That's a can of worms you don't want to open.

No, because if you aren't a computer nerd you have no idea that nobody runs the internet.  And anyway there's the great firewall of china, ICANN, etc...

Jeff Berwick simply rulez.  ;D
PJ(I don't got a better word for it atm)

03:43 PJ "The first time where you actually take my money off me, is that correct?"
03:47 Jeff  "...or give you a federal reserve notes from your Bitcoin account, we do both raze[sryhelpme]"
03:51 PJ "You do? A federal reserve note from my Bitcoin account?"
03:55 Jeff "Yeah."
03:56 PJ "Whats that mean? Dollar bill?"
heat
03:58 Jeff "If you look at Switzerland[sryhelpme] you might also notice"
heat
04:02 PJ "Wait a second, wait a second, so I put a dollar bill into your atm and I get a dollar bill back?"[LOL]
04:08 Jeff "No no, you put fiat currencies in, dollars, and it goes into your BTC account or if you have a Bitcoin account that has currency in it you can take, dollars, out of your Bitcoin account.
04:18 PJ "Alright, ok, so that's a conversion factor, introducing it in Southern California"
 ;D

The question who runs Bitcoin is legitimate and somewhat difficult to answer. You could argue that the miners are in control of Bitcoin, or even the mining pool operators. But what if somewhere in the future there is a conflict between the miners and the users? Who will win this? And how much influence does the core dev team or the foundation have over changes made to the protocol?
 
I think the correct answer would be that the Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that it is very difficult to make controversial changes to it and that there exists a fair balance of power between the developers, miners and users.

Those are basically the same issues there are with any free and open-source software.

Yes, but that is a different message than saying that nobody is in control of Bitcoin, because that implies that it can't be defended in case of an attack. There is control, but it is highly distributed.

i actually think the answer " "who runs internet?" is rhetorical.

i like "The People" b/c it answers the question directly, makes the interrogator pause and think, and it necessarily puts them on the defensive, as in "who would argue with such a principle?".